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am_Unition  ·  1465 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: FT has opened their Coronavirus tracker

I won't claim to be a fantastic science communicator in public-facing mode, but I do put some thought and effort into it. It's just intrinsically difficult to talk about magnetic field lines with that crowd, and it only gets weirder from there. The eyes tend to glaze over sometime between reminding people how Earth's magnetic field steers a compass, and telling them about the supersonic solar wind, which I think sounds pretty neato right outta the gate, but whatever. It's just not something I can casually talk about with anyone but other scientists, or places like Hubski. It takes effort. People here don't seem to mind putting in effort, but where the hell are you guys when I'm (well, when I was* #covid19) out doing social shit? I've pretty much given up even lightly probing to see if there's curiosity. I'm really good friends with people who have no idea about anything I do. They know I do science, but have never said "hey, so what do you study, anyway?". I don't think less of them because of it, we're different people, and connect over different interests. If they wanna give me an inside perspective on their careers, I'll take it, and I'll ask about it to initiate conversation in that direction. Everyone loves talking about themselves. But I've got colleagues who love to foist our field on innocent bystanders in transparent attempts to claim higher status. I found it repulsive.

Anyway, if the public fires off a "Why should we pay you to do this?", I explain that I'm also working with the magnetic confinement fusion community to make progress towards clean energy, and then like 40% of the country hates me because "clean energy" is literally a trigger phrase, and hey, why am I trying to help the world, maybe I should destroy it instead.

Probably my favorite audience was the freshman undergrads I TA'd for a couple years. They were brilliant, and they were also curious. Duh, 'cuz the two are heavily coupled.

Found ya on RG dotcom, suckaaaaaa